For those who have the same warped sense of humour this Letter can also be had in French.
(Complaints can be addressed to the Blog Council, your nearest newspaper, radio or TV station and when you leave this blog remember to pull the chain)
*Terms & Conditions Apply, if you can find them.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

MAVERICK'S REBECCA DAVIS TELLS IT LIKE IT ISN'T

Dear Rebecca Davis,

You didn’t half get your knickers in a
twist over my Tweets attacking you for swearing on Twitter. The on-line paper the
Daily Maverick that you write for
then, somewhat surprisingly, gave
you space to vent your anger with In defenceof sweary women.

In
your haste to get into print you didn’t let the facts stand in the way of a
good story. With the result that you got the wrong end of the stick completely.

You huffed and puffed for something like 1000 words displaying the huge chip you
seemed to have about being a woman.
At the same time, like a child that had just been reprimanded for swearing, you
used the phrase Fucking
hellwhich was thesubject
of my complaint twice and finished
with I’m
fucking angry.

Just to emphasise that nobody, least of all
a man, was going to stop you swearing, you threw in horsehit four times as well as your
show off boast that Profanity is part of myrhetorical
armoury.

For those readers who don’t keep up
with Twitter’s swearing female journalists the background was this. Rebecca commented
on the case of a teenage boy who had been convicted of killing his parents and
his sister who he also raped.

She Tweeted: So the accused
raped his own sister? Fuckinghell.

I asked on Twitter if it was alright to
use Fucking
Hellin the stories that appear in the Daily Maverick.

I gave a link to a previous post I had
written entitled Can Swearing & Journalism mix. In it I
took Carien duPlessis the senior political writer at City Press to task for using crap, fukkit, bullshitand pee in my paintsin her Tweets.

I argued that as a journalist she would
not be allowed to use this kind of language in the stories she wrote for City Press. So as she was in the public
eye she had a duty not to swear on social media as this would reflect badly on
her paper.

And
Rebecca you had obviously read this post because you referred to it in your
Maverick report as being badly written and
that I only accused Du Plessis of
using the word crap.

I
wasn’t even aware that ‘crap’ counted as a swearword, which shows how far
beyond the pale I really am,you added.

It
also shows what a wrong impression you can give if you leave out a significant
part of the story. To use your phrase this is extremely
selective.

Also had you done a bit of research you
would have found that Du Plessis
ceased her vile Twitter language immediately after my post appeared. Did she
have second thoughts or did her Editor Ferial
Haffajee tell her to stop it. I don’t know so I’ll leave it to you to
decide what this proves.

Your paper seems to have one rule for
its writers and another for people who comment
on it. Those who comment are
expected to abide by polite society everywhereso I would have expected
that writers like you would be required to do the same.

Evidently your Editor and founder Branko Brkic and I have very different
ideas of polite
society. My version certainly
doesn’t include the use of words like fuckingand horseshit.

Your paper’s website tells us that
anonymous comments are not acceptable
as they do not
breed thoughtful civiliseddebate. Real names
make for a real community.

So could you ask Branko why it was that among the comments on the bottom of your story there
were people (I assume they were people) with names like Kate, LG, Bonb, Panther,
Hilton and McKeon etc. You can’t get much more anonymous than
that.

THE EDITOR

My second question to him is this. If
names are so important why didn’t you mention my name which is on my Twitter
profile? Instead you described me as a stranger; one ofthe critics of my swearing and this same man.

By inference you attributed this to me.
It is myexperience, however, that the same men who jump to
rebuke me for swearing do not seem remotely disturbed by theswearing of my male counterparts, which suggests that their
delicate sense of offence is extremely selective.

AN EXTRACT FROM MY ORIGINAL POST ON THIS SUBJECTTHAT SHOWED I WAS IN GOOD COMPANY DEPLORING THISKIND OF LANGUAGE ON TWITTER

Well as you have not yet got the message Rebecca my
criticism of your swearing had nothing to do with you being a woman. It was, as I have already mentioned, entirely
due to the fact that you are a journalist. I would have said the same about any
male journo who did what you did.

From
what I’ve seen so far the male scribes have more sense and don’t have to court
publicity by soiling their own doorstep with swear words on Twitter.

Having once been employed editing
Oxford English Dictionaries I wouldn’t dispute your brag that you can legitimately
lay claim to a rich and extensive vocabulary; a bounteous lexical storehouse
stacked high and deep with sufficient entries to convey countless shades of
meaning and nuances of emotion.

A built in dictionary doesn’t necessarily
make you a good journalist.

You went on to say that I know loads of
words. I know so many words that I know ‘horsehit’ is by no means my only
option to express repugnance.

Yet like the little girl, sorry I better mention a boy as
well, trying to get attention you chose swear words instead of any of the other
more acceptable words in your head. So you had no logical excuse.

As you rightly said The precise form
the censor takesvaries, but the essenceis always the same.
In choosing to swear on a public
platform, you reveal yourself not to be a ‘lady’. You betray a fundamental lack
of ‘class’. You expose a vocabulary so deficient that you lack non-sweary
alternatives. You encourage observers to lose
all respect for you.

You said it Rebecca not me and whether you like it or not this is exactly how
sweary birds are perceived by many people.

The key
question is: Do newspapers that often expose the imperfections of others need
columnists and reporters like this?

Craig Bishop, who was probably unaware
of the journalist aspect, gave an apt if not somewhat
harsh summary of the situation in his comment
on your report.

This is not a
feminist problem – it is a social problem, he wrote.Trying to paint swearing into a feminist corner,while not invalid, limits the total resources society can
bring to bear upon the problem. Besides, swearing has been and always will be
the refuge of the illiterate, the uneducated, the vilely narcissistic, and
rightfully, people who have dropped a sledge hammer on their toe.

As
an aside I think a lot more women
must be taking up DIY. There’s anawful lot of
foul-mouthed chicks out there. It doesn’t somehow
make them equal to men. It makes them equal to the illiterate, uneducated and
vilely narcissistic men they have been told they can be equal to.

Why
not be better?

The first comment
I got after my tiff with you referred to my Du Plessis post. It was an Anonymous one saying: Fucking sexist
crap, this.

Obviously I don’t know who sent it but the
wording has the same sort of ring to it as the Readers Comments
Policy on the Maverick’s website
that begins Don’t
write stupid crap.

That’s one of the problems with those
many cowards who hide behind Anonymous tags. They leave so much to the
imagination.

Anyway enough of my cr..azy and fff……
fanciful ideas on how hacks should behave because we all know that practising
what they preach is not one of their strong points.

Regards,

Jon,
the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman, who exposes the embarrassing stuff about the
Press that it would prefer to keep under wraps.

P.S. In the interest of fairness I would have liked to get
a comment from
your Editor before I posted this but I was unable to do this. Your paper’s
website tells us that as the individuals on your paper are constantly running
around to bring
youamazing news and analysis we can be a
little hard to reach. This proved to
be true as far as I was concerned.

P.P.S. This seems far from
ideal if you are in the news gathering business.

P.P.P.S. It seems this post did some good because the Maverick's Readers Policy was changed. Here is my Tweet about it on 25/9/2014.

No comments:

Post a Comment

twitter

tweet

About Me

I was born in South Africa just before the Boer War whenever that was?
Started life with a golden spoon in my mouth which made eating rather difficult as a result I was under nourished as a child.
Went to a posh school where I only got moved up a class when my old man donated another sight screen for the cricket pitch.
Career prospects were dismal and I was once turned down for a job in the London sewers. "Too highly qualified;"that’s what they said.
I became a journalist when the Police Force wouldn’t have me.
Like most journos I know nothing about everything but I still write about it.
I decided to have my own blog so I wouldn't have to drink with the editor for hours on end to get my stuff published when according to my independent assessment it’s always of great news value.
My religious beliefs are: You only die once so remember, "You can’t be serious and Have Fun."
NEWS FLASH: I've just been appointed the Poor Man's Press Ombudsman by Presidential Decree (Not to be confused with the PRESS COUNCIL OF SOUTH AFRICA'S, SA Press Ombudsman)